Trump's trickle-down tax plan

For example, the plan removes taxes on extremely wealthy estates, slashes the top income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 35 percent, and abolishes the alternative minimum tax, which ensures that higher-income households--which are often able to take advantage of lucrative deductions and credits--contribute at least some modicum of taxes. It also gives a special low tax rate to owners of pass-through businesses, who are already able to avoid corporate taxes by instead paying personal tax rates on their portion of the businesses' profits, allowing them a lower effective tax rate. All of these provisions would benefit the wealthiest Americans, including Trump himself.

"According to analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center," the piece points out, "the final year of the conventional 10-year budget analysis. Meanwhile, the average household in the top 1 percent would see a tax cut of $207,060 [but] by 2027, 1 in 4 households would actually see their taxes increase under Trump's plan:"

New analysis by the Center for American Progress underscores the sacrifice that could be required in this trade-off. If the bottom 99 percent of households footed the bill for Trump's tax breaks for the top 1 percent, it would cost each household an average of $1,370 more in 2027.*

This is because tax cuts don't pay for themselves--especially cuts of this historic magnitude, which would reduce federal revenues by $2.4 trillion over 10 years. Financing Trump's proposal would require deep cuts to critical benefits and services that all families rely on.

Trump's tax plan, the piece continues, "is a double dose of tired trickle-down economics, delivered on a golden platter to millionaires and wealthy corporations to be paid for on the backs of average Americans." [See the full analysis "An Analysis of Donald Trump's Revised Tax Plan" (PDF).]